There is an ever increasing need for smaller, lighter, inexpensive, and higher-fidelity radiation detectors throughout numerous industry and government sectors. Current state-of-the-art detectors utilize bulky photomultiplier tubes that are often prohibitively large and power consuming to engineer into a useful portable product. Silicon-based solid-state photodetectors such as silicon photo-multipliers, avalanche photodiodes and PIN diodes can be attractive alternatives, however their performance can be limited by their inferior spectral overlap with the highest performing scintillators. That is, the wavelength of the light emitted by the scintillator in response to an ionizing radiation source does not coincide with the wavelength of peak response of a more compact photodetector, thus failing to take advantage of the other improvements one might expect from a system using a silicon-based chip-type photodetector.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a solution to the foregoing problem in order to solve both industrial and government problems in radiation detection.